Arty animals: We know they can paint, but is it art?

Shawn Simpson has long been fascinated by the creativity of animals.

He first became interested in the notion as a boy when he was enchanted by a spider’s web. Now a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, has made a study of animal ‘art’.

“I remember seeing a spider web for the first time thinking, wow, how beautiful is that? Get the shape of it, the symmetry. But as a child, I didn't really have any deep thoughts about what constituted art.

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“Now that I'm older and have studied this topic much more, I see that things like spider webs aren't, at least in most cases, going to count as art, because those things were created primarily, if not only, for practical purposes or utilitarian purposes, namely, to catch prey.”

Animals making beautiful things abound in nature, he says, such as the amazing structures created by the bower bird in Australia.

“Those works seem to be beautiful to us. They take a lot of skill. There's quite a bit of creativity to them. And yet they seem to be made for the purpose of attracting mates.

“Some philosophers and biologists have suggested that these can't be works of art primarily because they are made for that purpose, for attracting mates.”

But then, he says, human art can have the very same motivation.

“There's the stereotype, for example, of, the rock musician who's just making songs not to make great art, but to woo women.

“You're not really thinking, hey, this is going to be a work of art at the end. And then it kind of turns out it is.”

So is there art in animal world with more complex motivations than mate-seeking?

"There is an interesting case of this chimpanzee named Julie in in Zambia who would put a blade of grass in her ear and walk around with it.

"Other chimps started to copy this, put blades of grass in their ears too. And this kept going even after Julie was gone. Now was that for mate attraction purposes?

"It didn't seem to be. But was it for something more complex? We just don't really know.”

We can’t, he says, get in Julie’s head and find out why she did it.

The case of Pigcasso is more complex. Pigcasso was a pig in South Africa whose trainer taught her how to paint using reinforcement learning.

The trainer would pick out the paint and brushes and let Pigcasso loose on the canvas, Simpson says.

“Given all that training and given all the setup, one argument could be that, yeah, it's not really Pigcasso who's the artist and who's making the work of art.

"It's really Joanne [the trainer] using Pigcasso as a sort of instrument or tool, much like a normal artist would use a paint brush as a tool, but the Pigcasso case is somewhat interesting in that Pigcasso did have quite a bit of freedom.

“Pigcasso herself could choose how to make the brushstrokes, where to place them.”

This brings it closer, in his view, to art, he says.

"But again, this is a case similar to the Julie the chimp, you're not getting in the pig's head. We can't ask Pigcasso, ‘Hey, did you paint it that way because you felt like it or because you thought that looked beautiful?’

“As opposed to, 'did you paint it that way because you thought you were going to get a treat, and this is just the way you've kind of always done it'.”

Pigcasso worked in a more abstract style, but elephants have been taught to paint recognisable objects, he says.

"Elephants have been trained to make paintings where the image is pretty clear, it looks like a flower.

“Or in some cases, they even train an elephant to paint an elephant. Unfortunately, in the elephant cases, as far as I've found in my research, the freedom of expression for the element or for the elephant, is much narrower.

“They really just paint exactly, more or less what the trainers teach them to paint, whereas Pigcasso really could just put the brush where she wanted to.”

So where does this leave us? Can animals make art? Yes and no, says Simpson.

"I lean toward it being more likely that some animals are actually making things or engaging in performances that we should or rightly can consider art.

"Does that mean that all animals make art? No, I don't think that's the case. Does it mean most do? I also don't think that's the case. I think it's a very select few animals that have actually engaged in something that we would fairly call art.”

Until we find a Dr Doolittle to ask them, we’ll never really know, he says.